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Artists
Camille Turner
Miss Canadiana: Savoy, London, UK (above).
Miss Canadiana: Dakar. Dakar (below)
images courtesty of the artist
Title: MISS CANADIANA: RED WHITE AND BEAUTIFUL TOUR
Artist: Camille Turner (Toronto, ON)
Dates: October 7 and 8. Continue to check our website for performance times and offsite locations.
Presented by: MST
Nature of Event: performances
Artist's site - http://www.year01.com/camille
In Camille Turner's latest performance works, she portrays Miss Canadiana, a beauty queen on an international Red White and Beautiful Tour. The piece is part of a series of live, site-specific performances in which she uses her body as a site of social investigation. Dressed in tiara, sash and gown, Turner inserts herself into public spaces and records the sometimes surprising public responses.
Like many Canadians, Camille's cultural identity has been defined through the guise of "multiculturalism", as a fetishized display of "diversity" rather than an integral part of the fabric of Canadian culture. In response, she transformed herself into Miss Canadiana, an icon that challenges assumptions about Canadian identity and normative beauty. The public takes part in this project as an integral part of the live events and video/web documentation that blurs the line between "reality" and fiction.
Camille Turner is a Toronto-based media/performance artist and cultural producer. She is a founding member of Year Zero One. She has presented her collaborative projects, community engagements, public performance and digital interventions at venues such as: Dak’art lab 2004, La Biennale de l’art Africain contemporain, Senegal and Skinning our Tools: Designing for Context and Culture at the Banff New Media Institute. Camille has completed several international residencies and is currently artist-in residence at Central Neighbourhood House, a social agency in downtown east Toronto.
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Mara Verna
Title: WHITES GETTING ON and WHITES GOING IN
Artist: Mara Verna (Montreal, PQ)
Dates: Performance 12 noon to 4 pm, October 9. Opening reception, 8:00 pm, October 8. Exhibition: October 8 through to 31, Truck Gallery
Presented by: TRUCK Gallery
Nature of Event: performance, exhibition
Mara Verna
Whites Going in
still image
image courtesty of the artist
Through the creation of staged personas and situations, Verna’s performances investigate representations of difference and the impact of the “forces which aim to regulate all that is alien, unknown, or misunderstood.” Her performance personas enter into public spaces and use “visual, aural, and social gestures to act upon or even parody the personal and social forces of power” which exist in these spaces. Verna will present two works that “illustrate an often-precarious relationship to Whiteness as a critical point of engagement,” where the desire for that which we are not, becomes more alive when juxtaposed with what we are.
“A multi-layered dystopic narrative of a foreign woman struggling to make sense of her own status in face of the Other,” Whites Going In was shot on location in Mexico City, Kahnawake, Amsterdam, and Banff. Mimicking the essay-film, Whites Going In “challenges whether the concept of Otherness may be reconceived as Whiteness, so as to problematize its status as an unchallenged construct.”
Whites Getting On will take place over the course of several hours, in various locations within downtown Calgary. Born of an increasing fascination with what it means to covet, this performance operates within the illusion of make-believe, constructing a narrative that reinvests in the suspension of disbelief.
Mara Verna’s work has been shown extensively in Canada and internationally. Traveling broadly to produce public art and live art documents, her recent solo exhibitions include Same Same at Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic in Zagreb, Croatia, Rien n’a ete perdu at La Centrale Gallery in Montreal and La Vitrine Gallery in Paris, and Sorry to Disturb at The Bag Factory in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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VIRTUAL BODIES
Title: VIRTUAL BODIES
Artist: Anita Ponton (UK)
Dates and Venue: October 17 – 28, Alberta College of Art & Design (room TBA, please check our website for locations and times). Performance Cabaret: October 28, at the Nickle Arts Museum(Calgary).
Presented by: Alberta College of Art & Design
Nature of Event: workshop/Performance Cabaret
Anita Ponton
Virtual Bodies Workshop
image courtesty of the artist
Anita Ponton lives and works in London. Educated at Central St. Martins School of Art and Goldsmiths College, she is currently completing her doctorate in Fine Art. Trained as a painter/sculptor, she now works principally in performance, situating her body as site, as process and as object. Her work has been exhibited/performed internationally, including events and shows at the ICA London, the Venice Biennale and the Liljevalch Kunsthalle, Stockholm. She teaches at undergraduate and post-graduate level and curates performance events and exhibitions in unusual places. Her practice is currently concerned with the relationship of the body in performance to technology and to feminine representation.
The Virtual Bodies workshop is aimed at exploring different strategies for situating the body in performance within technologised spaces. Part practical and in part dealing with artistic concepts, the workshop aims to enable the development of projects to presentation stage. Working across different disciplines we will consider multiple ways of working with technologies. Comprising a small group of dedicated artists, the workshop will consider the following issues, as pertinent to each individual project:
-The relationship of ‘the body’ to the space it inhabits
-The context and the spaces in which the work exists
-The issue of presence and how one situates presence with different technologies
-Use of self in performance, especially the video double or web avatar
-The relationship of the performing body to the technologies used in the artwork
-How best to present the work – video installation/webcast/live performance
Participants will come to the workshop with an idea or project – it need not be fully shaped but it must be brought to a stage where it can be professionally presented at the end-of-workshop show. The show/presentation will take the form of a Performative Cabaret to be held at the Nickle Arts Museum, Calgary. An important component of the workshop will be to encourage collective thinking and skills swapping amongst the participants and how best to make the presentation a strong event for everyone involved. Participants will be expected to work hard and to support each other to developed a strong contextual awareness. Above all the workshop is intended to allow participants to experiment and play with their ideas and strategies.
Registration is prioritized for ACAD students and is limited to 10 participants. For more information about registering for the workshop, please see the M:ST3 website.
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WITNESSING: LOCATING AUDIENCE, ART, AND PERFORMANCE
Title: WITNESSING: LOCATING AUDIENCE, ART, AND PERFORMANCE
Panel Moderator: Dick Averns (Calgary, AB)
Panelists: Diane Borsato, Maria Hupfield, Rita McKeough
Dates: 12 noon October 12, Alberta College of Art and Design
Presented by: MST
Nature of Event: Panel discussion, Witnessing Series
The notion of witnessing implies an event that is not just supraliminal– powerful enough to be perceived – but also that such an act might be gauged in terms of evidence or testament. Performative practices engaging with the public domain, or conducted for a passing audience, are often particularly reliant on witnesses. This scenario gives rise to a complex set of relationships – sometimes referred to as dialogical practices or relational aesthetics – involving artist, artwork and audience.
For this panel, M:ST 3 artists Diane Borsato, Maria Hupfield and Rita McKeough will elaborate on how the concept of witnessing has impacted their practices, audiences and teaching or programming. Panel moderator, international performative artist and ACAD instructor Dick Averns, will lead the discussion through artworks and theories that also touch on First Nations’ traditions of witnessing, the implications of judicial connotations and the problematic of audienc expectations.
First Page of Artists >>
M:ST Collaborators:
ACAD | CSIF | EMMEDIA | The Nickle Arts Museum | Stride Gallery | The New Gallery | Truck Gallery | Southern Alberta Art Gallery | The Walter Phillips Gallery |
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